Oscar Winner Errol Morris Embarks On Two Fiction Features

Posted by Brian Brooks on 8.2.2013

Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Errol Morris is set to direct two fictional features, though the director will likely take time out this fall to promote his latest non-fiction work, The Unknown Known, which should start marking rounds to festivals in the coming months.

He has also been busy writing, according to a profile by The Boston Globe, which noted that he has two new books published in the last three years. The most recent is A Wilderness of Error , which takes a second look at the 1970 murder of Jeffrey MacDonald.

But it is his newest doc The Unknown Known that will likely take Morris on the road. The film turns the spotlight on former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld who discusses his long Washington career from a congressman in the 1960s to planning the 2003 invasion of Iraq. "Inevitably, there will be comparisons to [Oscar winner] The Fog of War, " Morris told the paper. "But it’s a very different kind of story. It’s a story about someone absolutely convinced of their own rectitude."

Additionally, Morris, along with fellow lauded documentarian (and former mentor) Werner Herzog took on executive producer roles this year on Joshua Oppenheimer's critically acclaimed (and controversial) doc The Act Of Killing, which played at New Directors/New Films this spring.

Meanwhile, Morris has two fictional feature works on the docket. Freezing People is Easy will apparently star Paul Rudd and Owen Wilson in a story centered on cryonics, while Holland, Michigan is described as a "Hitchcock-like movie" against the backdrop of a tulip festival.

"I think I am a late bloomer," the 65 year-old filmmaker said. "I think I'm getting less in my own way." Errol Morris screened Gates of Heaven (1978), Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (1993), The Fog of War (2003) at the annual New York Film Festival.

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